Usability FAQ

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What is usability?

"Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind an object's perceived efficiency or elegance."
From Wikipedia: "Usability"

Where can I find more information on usability?

• See Usability#Additional Resources for a detailed list of online and printed resources.
• Usability guru Jakob Nielsen's website
• Boxes and Arrows - "Boxes and Arrows is devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business."
• The Web Standards Project
• Designing with Web Standards, 2nd ed. by Jeffrey Zeldman

What's the difference between usability and accessibility?

See Accessibility for detailed information on this related concept.

See also

• Usability
• Interface guidelines
• Designing usable forms
• Moodle Usability forum
• Moodle User Interface Guidelines - Summer 2009 project to create user interface guidelines for Moodle
• "Make the Most of Your Studies: A Case Study and Web Usability Study Using the Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment Moodle with Postgraduate Students from Oil & Gas Related Courses" MSc Dissertation by Syndia Lengyel
• Quiz UI redesign - GSOC project 2008
• Quiz Usability portal
• Category:Accessibility
• Moodle Accessibility Specification
• Usability related issues in the Moodle Tracker

Using Moodle forum discussions:

• All Moodle forum discussions on usability (i.e. with the word "usability" in the subject line)
• "Moodle usability - general principles"
• Navigation 2.0
• "Why open source software usability tends to suck" - How do we work around this?